


tall cans hold hands

by cisphobickarkat



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Meteorstuck, Past Child Abuse, Pining, Quadrant Confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:00:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27892729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cisphobickarkat/pseuds/cisphobickarkat
Summary: He works with his headphones on, furrowing his brow and chewing on his lips, tipping his head like the music is already out there somewhere and all he has to do to find it is listen hard enough. You catch yourself watching his hands all the time lately—stacking empty cans of green tubular beanpods to build a police precinct, fussing through his own hair, twining around a coffee cup in the middle of the night.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 12
Kudos: 197





	tall cans hold hands

**Author's Note:**

> [title](https://youtu.be/oeLf2tI6EX8)

The first time he tells you about his wriggler days, you touch his face. Just a soft brush of nubtips, not even really a pap. Dave recoils like you slapped him.

“Dude, what the fuck.”

“It’s a gesture of sympathy, bulgemunch.”

Dave is straining against fight or flight, quickened breaths, tense muscles. He even drifts a couple inches off the floor.

Maybe paps aren’t pacifying gestures to humans?

“I didn’t ask for your sympathy,” Dave says.

Irritation hits your gastric sack like a swallow of extra-spicy grubsauce. These fucking stupid aliens and their refusal to understand anything remotely normal.

“Oh, really now? You tell me about your batshit lusus-bro and his brigade of stuffed-animal stalkers, and how he almost threw you off the roof of your hivestem one time for fun—” just thinking about it makes you angrier and sends a wave of impotent longing through you for your own lusus, the memory of being cared for and held. “Lusii are supposed to _protect_ , they—”

Dave snorts and flips his cape in a bombastic, tooly move that he’s totally going to deny later. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have said anything if I knew this was the Troll Lifetime Channel. Next time I’ll just keep it to my fucking self.”

The newest district of Can Town is erected in huffy silence. The two of you only talk when absolutely necessary, and even then only to the Mayor. Still, you somehow end up working on Town Hall back to back. Dave is warm through your sweater.

* * *

You’re sitting up late in the nutritionblock—you’ve finally made it to the first love scene in your book and like hell are you gonna put it down now. Dave stumbles in, dressed in red boxers and a white t-shirt with his sign printed on the chest, hair ruffled up like a featherbeast crest, shades crooked.

“I didn’t think there’d be anyone up,” he mumbles, lumbering across the room like an undead to hit a button on the coffeemaker. The machine lets out a menacing gurgle and starts to fill a cup. It smells a little like coffee, but also like a burning engine.

You expect Dave to retreat now that he’s got his drink, but he doesn’t. He sits down across the table from you and okay, yeah, this is a common area. He can sit wherever the fuck he wants to and drink his coffee and you can sit where you want to and read a fucking book.

He doesn’t drink the coffee. He just sits. And stares. He seems haunted, somehow. Used up, like his skin is damp, wispy fog that could dissolve at the tiniest breath of movement. The silence is stretched so thin it’s tearing.

You ask, “You want me to read out loud?”

Dave says, “What.”

“It’s a simple question, douchewagon.” You ruffle the pages, dust cover scudding against the tabletop. “You want me to read out loud?”

Dave shrugs. Fuck it. He can leave if he wants to. You flip back to the beginning, because there’s a lot of necessary stage-setting in the first chapters, important information on the characters and their motivations. Besides, you are not about to read a concupiscent love scene aloud to Dave while he’s sitting here looking so goddamned pitiable.

He probably isn’t getting any of the actual story, but the sound of your voice seems to ground him, the tension unwinding until he is sitting in the chair rather than hunching. By chapter two he has picked up his coffee, and by the time you begin chapter three, he has recovered enough to start making up nicknames for the love interests and insulting the writing style.

“No offense, dude,” he says. “But this book is kind of a steaming shitpile.”

You glare at him over the top of the page. “Thanks for the nuanced critique. Go fuck yourself.” It’s late. You don’t have a decent rant in you. Also you kind of agree with him. Callously Caliginous is not a great representation of the genre. “Why are you even up?”

Dave puffs his cheeks out in a nut-creature pout. “Wittle Davey had a bad dweam.”

He tells you about the nightmare.

Surrounded by black featherbeasts that hop and peck and open their orange beaks, and when they scream they scream in human voices. They peck at Dave’s face and hands before one of them, the biggest, with a crown of bones and weeds and shining things, snatches his shades off. She laughs at him as her threshcutioners tear at his face, until one of them emerges with his eyes to present to their empress.

Dave says ruefully, “Used to wake up screaming like a little girl ‘till I learned to keep that shit on lockdown.” He's pushing the mug around the tabletop, a ceaseless shift from hand to hand.

“Didn’t your lus—your Bro hear you?”

“He’d just turn the music up. Or say there must be a cat dying out on the fire escape, if he had people over.” He laughs with a brittleness that squeezes your bloodpusher into unfamiliar shapes. “He wasn’t the sort of dude you climbed into bed with when you couldn't sleep.”

“Well, I could have crawled into bed with my lusus,” you say. “If I wanted a serrated pincer up my waste chute in the middle of the night."

The icy chuckle turns into a full on laugh. “Whatever you’re into, dude. I’m not about the judgment.”

You’re both smiling now, sitting here gazing at each other like pan-rotted wrigglers. Typical for the life of Karkat Vantas that the first person to pale-flirt with you in a sweep is an arrogant, flap-dangling human who doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Telling you about his shitty human lusus and making you feel all squishy and conciliatory. You want to walk around the table and pull his head against your chest and bury your face in that pale, fluffy hair. It’s so stupid-looking, and _fuck_ , probably _so_ soft. You want to rub circles in the place his horns should be.

It’s just instincts. Whatever. You’re a higher fucking life form so you can curb the impulse and instead tell him about the two days you spent listening to your neighbor die. One of the undead had broken into her hive and taken its time finishing her off. You can still remember her screams. You tell him about the crawlspace that your lusus dug beneath your recreation block when you were a wriggler. Whenever a culling drone would drift close, you would lie cradled in the dirt, cold earth hiding the mutant heat of your body. Dave is a much better audience for this than he was for the book.

When the two of you finally do drift off to your opposite ends of the meteor, you feel wrung out, flat and jittery with catharsis, your skin cold. Your dreams pulse with rivers of blood and huge, ugly crows.

* * *

At first you refuse to subject your aural canals to Dave’s shitty music, but after rereading every book in your sylladex five times, watching all your movies, and wandering every dreary scientific fiction-esque inch of the meteor, ancient slam poetry starts to sound okay.

Dave has alchemized equipment, human electronics with impervious shells and sleek, unnatural colors, nothing organic about them at all. He sets up in the common room so as to annoy as many people as possible. He works with headphones on, furrowing his brow and chewing on his lips, tipping his head like the music is already out there somewhere and all he has to do to find it is listen hard enough. You watch the shadows lap at his jaw and collarbones, the quick jolts of his fingers on the turntables and little sliding dials that you don’t know the words for. You catch yourself watching his hands all the time lately—stacking empty cans of green tubular beanpods to build a police precinct, fussing through his own hair, twining around a coffee cup in the middle of the night. They can turn back time, close loops, create endless other selves to wander the bleakness of the dream bubbles. You have no idea what a god of blood would do—that ship has sailed, crashed, and sent hundreds of sailors screaming to their deaths—but you doubt it could be as powerful as a god of time.

Someone bounces down beside you and the couch springs vibrate, nearly jolting your book out of your hands.

“Fuck off,” you grunt reflexively.

Vriska grins through a curtain of curling steam, claws wrapped around a mug. She and Kanaya have both picked up Rose’s human quirk of sucking down scalding hot leaf juice all day long. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“Oh, really? Is it something that sounds like a perceptively deep insight into my psyche, but is in fact just inane, dribbling bullshit with no basis in actual reality? Because that’s just the usual shit that slides from your facegash.” You huddle down more comfortably against the cushioned back of the couch and hunch your shoulders. “I’m busy.”

“Oh please, you’re pretending to read a book.”

“ _Pretending_ to read a book? You're unbelievable. Here I am, minding my own business, sitting quietly—”

Vriska snorts.

“—with my novel, not bothering anyone, but no, I must be _pretending_ to read the fucking book. Are you really so bored that you need to come over here and start making stuff up?”

“Hm…” Vriska sips smugly at her leaf water. “To me it seems like unless your book is printed across Dave’s forehead, you haven’t been doing much reading at all.”

Dave clucks in annoyance and presses his headphones to his ears, and holy slurry-guzzling horrorterrors, you hope he hasn't overheard any of this.

“Might as well go for it.” Vriska is still talking. Why. Why this. “It’s not like the two of you have many other concupiscent options, what with human taboos and both of you shoving your strut-pods down your shout-tunnels with Terezi. And I’m pretty sure the Mayor doesn’t even have mating urges—”

“Oh my god.”

“—and I would rather lay my body down in a pit of fire marchbugs than let either of you touch it, so I say ogle away!”

* * *

Your friend-jams with Dave get more and more frequent. Most of them take place in your respiteblock rather than his, since you flatly refuse to have any sort of serious conversations on a concupiscent platform, even if humans insist on sleeping on them like highbloods in some satiny harem romance. You take to leaving your door open, not because you are hoping he will wander in, okay, you just like a little air circulation on your horntips. Today he comes in so silently that you’re pretty sure he’s hovering, which is totally unfair.

He faceplants into your pile, onto one of Rose’s more atrocious sweater attempts (pink and green with a pattern of misshapen meowbeasts), elbow hitting a cracked DVD jewel case. He gets a face full of moldy couch cushion.

“Sup.”

“Yes, Dave. Come and climb onto my pile with me. Invade my personal space and get your nasty human oral fluid all over my cushions.”

Dave maneuvers himself onto his back. “Dude, what? You guys need a better word for saliva.”

“Oh, right. So we should just adopt all your needlessly extravagant vocabulary and run around like pompous sea-dwellers with our fists up our nooks?”

Dave hooks an eyebrow over his shades. Your face burns and you drop your attention back to your husktop screen.

It’s been a couple of days since you’ve hung out. Dave’s mood has been wavering—one second he’s moping around the lab, muttering lyrics to himself, and the next he’s teaching you and the Mayor wriggler games, which you refuse to believe involve chalk renderings of a human bulge, no matter how fucked up Earth civilization was.

Dave rolls onto his back, his shirt riding up at the hem. You don’t mean to check him out, but self control only goes _so far._

“Yo.”

 _shit_ , has he caught you looking? You ease when he makes a thoughtful noise and goes on, “You ever think about dying?”

 _What?_ “What?” 

He has one arm curled lazily over his head. It would be a hilariously come hither pose if he had been doing it in any other circumstance. The lenses of his shades are pointed straight at you, but you can never tell where he’s looking. It drives you crazy.

“Uh, yeah?” you say. “No shit. We’re on a meteor traveling roughly the speed of light, en route to an alternate reality while being pursued by an omniscient woofbeast with a sword. And about 80% of the people we’re stuck here with are violent psychopaths with zero impulse control. _Of course_ I think about dying.”

Dave shifts a little, settling himself more firmly into the pile. You hear the distant bray of a buried honk-horn. You thought you’d gotten rid of all those things. “Nah, I mean, d’you ever think about just getting it over with. Back when you lived on Shitditch Lane in Assfuck Nowhere. When it was just you and crabdad and a whole planet fulla simpering idiots who all literally hated your guts.”

You push your husktop aside and sit up. “Not for one fucking minute. I was prepared to live as long as possible out of spite.”

Dave’s lips twitch. “Whoa, no way. Karkat Vantas doing something out of spite? Call up the newspapers. Alert Troll CNN.”

“Fuck you very much. Anyway, suicide isn’t really a thing on Alternia. If you want to kill yourself, it’s probably because you’re broken or fucked up in some way, right? Which means one of the drones will probably get to you first.”

This is so weird. Lying on your pile with a human, Dave of all people, who you had expected to shack up with Terezi the first chance he got. Who’s been watching movies with you and listening to you read aloud, playing dumb games and generally acting like your moirail. But if he really _was_ your moirail, the endless foot of space between you wouldn’t exist, the field of afghans and comic book pages and broken tupperware. Your skin wouldn’t be thrumming with the longing to be touched, gastric sack squirming with a multicolored palette of emotions, some of which aren’t very pale at all.

“Wait,” you say. “Hold on a second. Do _you_ think about suicide?”

“Are you kidding? Getting Daves killed is, like, my number one form of recreation.” Dave talks with his hands, god pajamas bunching at knobbly wrists. You want to bite at the soft, dark skin. “And before the game I didn’t really think about it like, yo, cool party idea: let’s kill ourselves. I’m gonna need Colonel Mustard, a lead pipe, and a conservatory.” His voice is as light as featherbeast down, the meaningless reference tossed out as carelessly as anything else he sprays from his mouth, but you can feel the hand squeezing down on your pump-biscuit again.

“But sometimes I’d just think, like… what if I stopped?”

You worm a little closer. “Stopped what?”

“Normal shit. Like, eating? No problem. Had to get most of my food by myself anyway. Sleeping I guess I couldn’t really control, but—” His voice cracks like a dry bone. “Or maybe just when we were strifing, what if I just didn’t block? He’s never pulled a punch in his life.”

“You think he would have just killed you?” That sick feeling is coming back. That isn’t what lusii do.

Dave shrugs against the pile. “Don’t know. But part of me kinda wanted to find out, even though I always told myself I was just being an angsty little fucker. Of course I woulda starved if I stopped feeding myself. My bro was a busy dude, he doesn’t have time to deal with shitty little brothers without basic survival instincts. I mean, if you step in front of a bus you’re gonna get—” His voice thickens and trembles, like ripples in sopor. “Gonna get hit, shit—” He scrubs at his nose. You keep it dark in your block, and turned away from the light his shades look like two black holes opening in his face. “Wow, uh, I swear this isn’t why I came in here. I wasn’t all ‘shit, let’s get emotional all over Karkat today’—”

“You’re such a fucking idiot,” you say, and pap him squarely on the cheek.

Dave doesn’t recoil like last time, but a steady shudder moves through him. You’re careful to keep your claws curled away, and do it again.

“This is a troll thing, right?” He swallows, the ball of his throat trembling, skin so thin, so delicate. “A pale thing?

“Right for once in your pathetic human life.”

“Right. Okay.” Dave’s hair is pushed into a fluffy bump on the top of his head and his shades are knocked crooked. You can feel his warmth transmitted through the pile. You wanna touch him so badly. “Okay, so, uh, for humans this is an awkward thing. Like, two bros hanging out on a pile of random household objects and stroking each other’s faces and gazing into each other’s eyes—”

“I can’t see your eyes.”

“Still hella gay, dude.”

“So clearly we have to stop immediately. God fucking forbid that something gay happens.” You stroke your thumb across his cheek and he shivers, actually fucking trembles at your touch. He wraps a hand around your wrist, but he doesn’t try to pull you away.

You reach up with your other hand and take off his shades.

He reacts like you’ve just pantsed him in a courtroom full of legislacerators. “Dude, what the fuck!” He bares his flat teeth, and your gaze flickers north. His lashes are so pale they almost glow, a sharp contrast to the deep brown of his skin, and his eyes are craters of outraged shock. Provided your mutant freakshow of a body matures the way it is supposed to, they are the same color yours will be in a couple sweeps. Red. _Red_.

He lunges. You move on instinct, snarling, pinning him easily. You’re stronger than he is, smaller but more dense, compact. You could slice him into tiny glistening pieces. He might be a flying, time-traveling douchetier, but physically he’s no match. Abruptly he seems to realize this, sinking back into the pile with a hard puff of breath. “You’re fucking nuts.” His eyes are gorgeous.

You have to be asleep. That’s the only possible answer. There’s no way this can be your Dave (when did you start thinking of him as _yours_?), no way he would just let you toss his shades aside and stare at him. His eyes can’t be lava red, meteor red, _your_ red. He can’t possibly have spent years hiding them behind shades the way you have hidden the sludge in your veins with grey words and floppy sweaters. That’s too goddamn poetic for real life. That's a casteplay romance. Humans don’t even _have_ red eyes.

“Dude, if you wanted the full monty you should’ve told me. I haven’t even gathered a dowry, I ain’t got a single fucking sheep—”

“ _Shut up_ , Strider.”

You clench a handful of pale hair and he makes a tiny noise as you lick into the soft heat of his mouth. You stroke your claws against his cheek. “Come on,” you growl. You are not even sure what you’re asking for.

“Whoa.” Dave puts a hand against your chest and for second you think he is going to push you away, but he’s just holding steady, feeling you. You’re purring. Fuck, you’ve only been touching him for less than a minute and you’re already purring with pleasure.

“You do not get to mock me for a purely physical reaction. I’d like to see you try to—"

“Chill.” He moves his fingertips over your thorax like he is searching for the source of the rumble. “It’s cool. I mean, uh, kinda neat.” He winces, probably because he just used the word ‘neat’ unironically. Then he smiles, and without his shades he can’t pass it off as smug. His eyes shine like the bloody rivers of your land and the fiery ones in his. If this was a romance novel it would be called “Eyes on Fire” or something equally stupid. (god. you’re so nauseating.)

You drag your clawtips across his cheek again and he hisses, draws back like he’s afraid you’re gonna gouge into him, like you think this is pitch. When you’d met him, definitely—you couldn’t have imagined feeling anything but nookchafing, bilespitting irritation for him—but right now with him underneath you, body warm against yours and _not pushing you away_ , you feel so flushed that you can’t imagine how you could ever flip on him.

* * *

You don’t have trouble imagining it for very long.

Barely a day after you spend the better part of an hour making out on a pile, you run into him by the transportalizer to the lab. He’s standing with his back bowed, fingers twisting in his cape. You aren’t trying to be stealthy—after what had happened on this meteor no one wants to be snuck up on.

“Hey, are you—”

Dave goes after you when you are still a couple feet away, closing the distance in that freaky-fast flash you’re still half-convinced has to be time shenanigans; you’ve never seen anyone move that fast, not even Nepeta. Your shoulders hit the flimsy metal wall and his hands hit the collar of your sweater. You choke beneath your shock and his wiry, desperate strength. Black-scarlet flashes across your vision and a growl vibrates in your thorax. You have to quell the instinct to slice him open across his unprotected torso. Random disemboweling probably isn’t heroic or just enough to kill a god tier, but it would still be a shitty thing to do to a potential matesprit.

He lets go after a second.

You don’t quell the enraged shout of, “Jesus _fuck_ , Strider!”

The portcullis of his shades is pulled back down over his eyes, and he shrinks away from you like he had that first time you’d touched him. He shoves his hands in his pockets, going for casual way too late. “I’m not in the mood, bro.”

“Not in the mood for what?” You hadn’t even said anything. “ _I’m_ not in the fucking mood to get thrown into walls!”

“For this, for whatever the fuck _this_ is—” He gestures between the two of you with splayed fingers. “I just… I can’t deal with it right now, okay?”

“Oh.” Your face burns and your bloodpusher feels like it’s trying to drill into your gastric sack. “We don’t have to do anything concupiscent, if you don’t…we could just talk?”

You can barely keep from cringing at yourself.

Dave sneers. “How about you find someone else to share your delicate troll feels with. Maybe the Mayor, or like, a wall.”

He stomps away and you’re left with ringing in your ears and battery acid pumping through your veins. What the fuck had gone wrong since yesterday? You thought he’d been into it, into _you_.

( _think about it, bulgelick. maybe it’s because you can’t keep him in one fucking quadrant._ )

You shudder. Then you step on the transportalizer and you’re suddenly shuddering down to your atoms. Your nerves get too scrambled to feel any pain, but you’re shaking and tightness pulses behind your eyes— it’s like you’re growing a tumor every time you use the damn thing.

The lab is in its familiar tableau—coffee machine smoking slightly, headphones and books and markers strewn across the table in a colorful deluge, Rose and Kanaya seated at one end of the table, knee to knee, like they’ll spontaneously combust if they let two feet get between them. Rose takes one look at you and says, “It isn’t you.”

She knows. She _always_ fucking knows.

Your skin prickles all the way to the tips of your claws. “What?”

She flips idly through whatever Tome of Darkist Magyckks she’s got open on the table. “Whatever inevitable outburst happened in the hall. It isn’t you. Well, it _is_ you,” she amends, a touch smugly. “But it’s not your fault.”

You walk right past her and get very interested in the coffee machine. You tap a claw against the button that looks like a cup with a tuft of hair coming out of it, and the hissing and shifting of the mysterious machinery within drowns out Rose’s and Kanaya’s murmured exchange. They only use a couple words; if Kanaya hadn’t been a jade-blood and Rose a nothing-blood you would have said they were communicating telepathically. You feel a dark swirl of something as putrid and acidic as the coffee pissing into your mug. God dammit, you do not want to sit giggling in a corner with Dave and finish his fucking sentences like the most obnoxious kind of matesprits. Even though you kind of already do that.

You set your coffee down hard next to Lalonde’s book. “What do you mean?”

Fuck you sideways with a rusty culling fork you’re actually doing this.

“What do you mean, it’s me but it’s not my fault?

Rose closes her book with a decided little flick of the fingers, oozing satisfaction. “He’s currently in the throes of a textbook queer-crisis,” she says. “What we have in front of us are Dave Strider’s attempts to come to grips with his building attraction to grey-skinned alien boys with, I quote, “cute little fucking horns.”

You flush all the way down to your thoratic struts. “He called my horns cute?”

“I’m honestly impressed,” Rose says. “I didn’t think he’d manage to claw his way out of the closet for at least another few years.” She fixes you with that stare that makes you feel like your thoughts are stamped on the outside of your pan in block letters. “You’ve been really good for him.”

Dave avoids you for a while. Or you avoid him. You’re civil to each other—pass the grubsauce at dinner and talk about the lack of weather and work on Can Town, which is slowly expanding to suburbs and farmsteads and fairgrounds, but that intimacy, that human emotion called friendship that had made you warm all the way from your strut-pods to your hornbeds is gone. You killed it and pailed its corpse. No surprise he doesn’t want to talk to you—he had come in to lie in your pile all pale and vulnerable, and in response you’d macked on him like the slimiest, most plague-ridden nooklicker to wriggle out of the brooding caverns. No wonder he’d attacked you by the transportalizer.

* * *

His entrance is less dramatic and you have a book this time instead of your husktop, but the setting is otherwise familiar. You pretend you don’t notice him, but you’re reading the same line over and over. Instead of face planting onto your pile, he stands next to a busted toaster and fidgets.

You raise an eyebrow. “Should I just bare my throat and get it over with, or are you not going to fight like a sneaky asshole this time?”

Dave fusses with his cape. “Yeah, uh, sorry about the—” He makes a violent motion with his arms that looks nothing like choking. More like he’s cracking an egg. “I was being a douche.”

You snort. “Permanent state.”

He licks his lips a couple times. “So… you wanna spar.” He might have been about to say something else. You’re a little distracted by the sight of his weird mammal tongue dragging across his weird mammal lips.

You toss your book aside and grab your sickles out of your sylladex. “Sure.”

Sparring with Dave is usually infuriating. He’s faster and his reach is longer, and he’s categorically incapable of doing anything without running his mouth. Even though you’re stronger, he always wins, and he does it with a goddamn swagger. Like he’s only trying halfway and you’re wasting his time.

Today, he doesn’t talk. He focuses, his mouth crumpled into a thin line, breaths of exertion pressed up into gasps. You know what he’s doing—this isn’t sparring for fun or for practice. This is a sedative, this is pushing himself to exhaustion. Back in your hive you would queue up music and then practice for hours, until your muscles felt like twisted slabs of melting rock and you could drag yourself to your cocoon and make sure you didn’t wake for another ten hours.

Dave winces every time his sword hits your sickle. His hands are shaking.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” you snap after almost ten minutes of thick, humid silence. Dave’s shoulders shake and his thorax expands and contracts in greedy gulps. Sweat rolls down his cheeks and drips off his chin. Is he sick?

In the next exchange you catch his sword with the curve of your sickle and twist, a fancy disarm that never works; Dave is just too quick. Today his grip gives instantly. You watch as his sword sails off over the practice mat. The only warning you get is the soft patter of hurried feet and a breath of wind before Dave hits you, hard and low, knocking your feet out from under you. You go down with a stifled shout, your sickles and his shades skittering off across the floor. 

“What the bulgeknotting _fuck_ —Dave!” He wriggles like a slitherbeast, body hot and spine-meltingly nubile against yours. You pin him down just like you’d pinned him to your pile a week ago. He blinks, and if you thought seeing his eyes would help explain what the shitfuck is going on, you’re disappointed. They’re crimson holes in his face, unseeing. Or seeing something that isn’t there.

You shake him, because you’re starting to seriously freak out. He’s acting like a robot with a part missing. “Dave, what the fuck, are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

His eyes snap back to awareness. You stay that way, breathing in each other’s faces, mingling the mutant heat of your bodies. It doesn’t matter what quadrant you put him in, flushed or black or pale— you want _him_.

You don’t know who kisses who this time, only that suddenly you’re a mass of wet mouths and clutching hands, his fingers twisting into your hair until your scalp stings.

You kiss his throat, gasping, too desperate to be careful of your teeth. You can practically feel the marks painting his skin. Stupid humans and their stupid delicate bodies. What’s it like knowing you break so easily?

You force yourself to still, to return to his mouth and kiss him slow and soft. He’s being so weird right now that it’s up to you to make sure he doesn’t get hurt. You’re not sure you want that job.

_(“Like…what if I stopped?”)_

You sit up and bend your knees, drawing yourself into a curl. You feel sick. Dave’s eyes open and he gazes over to where his shades have landed, out of reach of both of you. He covers his face with his arms.

“You can’t keep doing this, bro.”

“Me!” you squawk. “I’m not doing anything! I’m an innocent bystander! You’re the one who goes around all moody and antagonizing, and then comes and face-plants into my pile looking all pitiable and conciliatory. You’re giving me quadrant whiplash!”

“I don’t give a fuck about your fucking quadrants—”

“I _know_ that! You’ve only told me everyday since I’ve known you. But you go around smelling like—” You swallow that back down, because you’re not going to tell Dave how receptive your body has become to his pheromones. “Whatever. I’m not going to sit here and help you punish yourself.” You already have a full schedule of punishing _yourself_ , all appointments fully booked. “I don’t know what’s going on with you. Or, I do, sort of. Some kind of human gay homo crisis, whatever the fuck that is—”

“What the fuck,” he hisses. “Who the fuck have you been talking to?”

“Lalonde, who else?” You feel a momentary squirm of guilt at throwing her under the scuttlebuggy. “But it’s not like I can’t tell there’s something going on with you.”

His mouth snaps shut. You can’t stop looking at his eyes. He pulls his knees up to his chin and wraps his arms around them, mirroring your posture. Lalonde had once told you that if someone starts copying your motions it means that you’ve got them in your clutches and they’re primed for manipulation.

“Rose doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about,” Dave lies.

“I know that,” you lie back.

* * *

Dave doesn’t try to kiss you again or slam you against any walls. He’s still a constant presence, a babbling ghost haunting the halls of the meteor and occasionally rapping to himself. Or maybe just talking. Like hell you’re gonna go beg for his attention.

You’re in your block, half-watching a movie on your husktop, half brooding about your shitty place in the universe, when trollian chimes, the little icon hopping in the corner and forcing the video player to minimize. It’s been weeks since you've used the messenger at all. Everyone you know is either dead, unreachable, or lives with you.

Your surprise and curiosity grows when you see who’s trolling you.

TG: sup

You pause the movie and tug your husktop into your lap, tentatively alighting your claws on the keys.

CG: DAVE? 

TG: nah man its the other dave 

TG: the dave of christmas future

TG: showin up perigrees early like a big cape wearing santa to impart gifts and knowledge and teach you and dave prime how to feel all your feelings 

CG: OKAY, THAT WOULD BE FUNNY, EXCEPT YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO THAT AND PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE. 

CG: ACTUALLY, IT’S NOT FUNNY AT ALL AND NEVER WOULD BE. IT’S NOT EVEN REALLY A JOKE. GOOD FUCKING JOB. 

CG: NOW WHAT DO YOU WANT. I’M BUSY. 

TG: bullshit 

TG: youre watching ten things i hate about you for the fourteenth time i just walked past and heard it 

CG: WELL I GUESS YOU GOT ME THERE, MR. DETECTIVE. IF YOU WERE WALKING BY THEN WHY NOT JUST KNOCK ON THE DOOR LIKE AN ACTUAL FUNCTIONING MEMBER OF YOUR SPECIES? 

CG: OR IS ACKNOWLEDGING MY EXISTENCE TOO MUCH TROUBLE? 

You know you’re being a jerk, but it chafes your bulge that he has spent the last week pretending you don’t exist and is now just messaging you like nothing ever happened.

TG: this is just a lot easier to talk about over chat than in person 

TG: if thats okay with your highness troll god majesty 

CG: OH. 

CG: OKAY. UH. 

CG: WHAT IS THIS EXACTLY? 

TG: this is nothing 

TG: or at least nothing that fits into a quadrant 

TG: or maybe it does i dont know but thats not why im doing it 

TG: im not pale flirting with you or whatever else bullshit category you guys shove every single one of your interactions into 

TG: i just wanna talk 

TG: or i guess i want to like leave a huge wall of red text on your screen that you can read if you feel like it 

He pauses like he’s waiting for a response, but you just let the cursor flash. After a couple seconds he starts typing again.

TG: look i know ive been a douche of monolithic proportions over the last couple weeks 

TG: okay maybe way longer than that 

TG: but to be fair i kinda learned from the douche master ie my bro slash lusus slash dude who threw me off my hivestem one time 

TG: anyway i know i shouldnt talk about that or your cuddly troll hindbrain will be unable to resist giving me snuggle paps 

TG: or maybe 

TG: you know 

TG: try to kiss me again 

TG: which i would actually be okay with 

TG: the kissing not the face petting 

TG: i still think thats weird 

TG: but i think i should try to explain a couple of things before we get down to pile humping 

TG: if thats actually a thing you wanna be doing or whatever 

TG: because it kind of occurred to me that all of this human stuff im freaking out about probably makes about as much sense to you as all of your guys weird blood rank bullshit makes to me 

CG: I’M GOING TO LET ‘BLOOD RANK BULLSHIT’ SLIDE IN THE INTEREST OF KEEPING THINGS CIVIL. 

TG: see this is the exact shit im talking about 

TG: were from totally different cultures dude 

TG: none of that makes any sense to me 

TG: big fuckin goose egg zero 

TG: i mean on earth we have our own bullshit prejudices to deal with 

TG: like homophobia and stuff like that 

TG: but i am so totally outside this hemospectrum stuff that its just complete nonsense to me 

TG: like i know youre a mutant right 

TG: which means you grew up alone because you were afraid of being judged and killed 

TG: and then later you hid it from your friends because you thought they wouldnt like you anymore if they knew 

Your first instinct is to say you’re pretty sure they didn’t like you that much regardless, but seeing your life spelled out completely dispassionately, like a movie title, leaves you with an unpleasant hollowness in your chest.

TG: see to me thats just totally absurd 

TG: not wanting to be someones friend because of the color they bleed 

TG: but for you its this whole huge deal 

TG: and for me kind of really wanting to mack on a dude is also a huge deal 

TG: while you being into me is not a big deal for you 

CG: IT’S WEIRD FOR ME TOO, DAVE. BELIEVE ME. 

CG: JUST FYI. 

TG: right its weird but not in a this is weird because one dude likes another dude way 

TG: just in a wow making out with dave damn thats strange cause usually i just want him to choke on my bulge and not in a sexy way 

TG: anyway 

TG: what im trying to say is that it might not be a thing for you but its a thing for me 

CG: OK.  


TG: ok what does ok mean 

CG: IT MEANS EXACTLY WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. OK. I GET IT. I HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE ALIEN FUCKERY BUT YOU HAVE MALE FUCKERY ON TOP OF THAT. IT’S TOO WEIRD FOR YOU. YOU DON’T WANT TO DO IT AGAIN. 

You’re laying it on a little thick, but you’ve got this pain above your gastric sack, and every time your pump biscuit twitches it smacks it like a blue blood on a rampage. You can’t believe this; you’re actually blinking back filmy red tears because some idiot can’t get over his hang-ups long enough to roll around in a pile with you.

TG: hold up thats not what im saying 

TG: yeah its hella weird but that doesnt mean i dont wanna do it 

CG: REALLY? 

TG: yeah dude if weirdness was a deterrent i would have fallen on my sword years ago 

TG: things started weird and got weirder and now weve gone so far past weird that weird is just a pimple on the ass of something much bigger and weirder 

TG: so yeah i dont wanna stop 

TG: im just warning you that i might like 

TG: i dunno 

TG: flip the fuck off the handle a couple times 

TG: or maybe say some stuff i dont mean 

TG: or wont mean after i actually think about it a little 

TG: so i guess im just warning you or whatever 

What he’s doing is asking you to give him free reign to be a heinous jerkoff whenever he feels like it. But you behave like that all the time, free reign or no.

CG: FINE. BUT I RESERVE THE RIGHT AND PRIVILEGE TO TOSS YOU OUT OF MY BLOCK BY THE SEAT OF YOUR FILTHY FUCKING GOD PAJAMAS IF YOU PISS ME OFF. 

TG: done 

TG: should i like 

TG: come over 

CG: I DON’T FUCKING KNOW, DAVE, SHOULD YOU?

TG: hell yeah 

TG: omw dude

You’re in the midst of shutting your husktop when it chimes once more, about a minute after Dave’s last message.

TG: <3

Your face burns, and something squirms in your chest, warm and pounding and helpless.

CG: <3 

* * *

The makeouts get steadily better, from there. Dave is fine with kissing you. _More_ than fine. He spends slow, intent hours memorizing your mouth, tracing the points of your fangs with his tongue. He learns just the right amount of pressure he can exert before he cuts himself. He gets his own pathetic teeth into your neck, which usually goes from _!!!! wow_ to _what the fuck are you doing you flat-fanged fuck stop drooling on me_ before he manages to leave a mark.

Dave slides between saying nothing and saying everything, and sometimes he says everything without actually saying anything at all.

“Dude, your skin tastes all peppery and shit. Like, I might just be saying that because you’re grey and pepper is also kinda grey. Except when it’s in those little black balls. But that’s not it, I don’t think. And it’s hella smooth, like a dolphin. Or how I bet a dolphin feels. I’ve never felt a dolphin, there aren’t many dolphins in Texas. It’s too conservative.”

“If you compose ancient slam poetry to my skin I’ll claw your face off,” you promise, but you love how he can’t keep his hands off you.

Your quadrant confusion eventually tapers out into a blurry mess, smeared across all four. Surprisingly, it doesn’t feel as wrong or outrageous as you’d expected it to. You figure, hey, if Dave can suppress his freaky ‘kissing girls only’ mutation, then you can blur a couple quadrant rules.

You still burn with knowledge of what you’re heading toward, though—death, destruction, some undoubtedly shitty climax. You’ve been on this rock for a sweep and a half, why has it taken so goddamn long to crash into each other? Not even considering how many countless fractured timelines where you hate each other platonically, or were indifferent, or never even met at all. Where you died still thinking no one could ever look past the sludge in your veins, where Dave went on believing all the shit his lusus told him.

It hits you all at once sometimes, the interminable plethora of what-ifs— what if none of it _works_ , between you and Dave? What if things get weird again, what if everyone finds out, what if, what if, what if?

You think Dave can tell, by the way he grabs your hand beneath the table or the blankets whenever you start to question it all and mumbles, “Everything cool?”

“Yeah,” you always say, that particular something squirming inside you whenever he rubs his thumb over your palm, warm and aching and _happy_. “Yeah, it’s cool.”

**Author's Note:**

> its 5 am im fucking gay........ gn!!


End file.
